Considering there is absolutely no way to verify any of the information collected this way, without somehow having access to that person's medical records AND they would have had to had visited a medical professional to confirm it themselves, this seems like an entirely redudant exercise.

"After discarding the data of a handful of individuals for a variety of reasons, the researchers set out to analyze the tweets from both groups in their study to determine whether they could diagnose influenza from Twitter posts."

In other words, they discarded the individuals who hadn't given any clue about their flu in their tweets. :D

My diagnosis: Crowd awareness of Google Flu Trends leads to trend results corruption. If you have the flu and know Google is watching your searches, you may modify your key word choices to maintain a little privacy.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.